Emergency steering

As part of Juno's preparation for offshore racing we have tried out various items of "emergency" gear - including our emergency steering arrangements.

It's a frightening thought, but with all the tales of containers floating in the channel, to say nothing of the effects of age on spade rudder stocks, perhaps every crew should be ready for the day when the wheel just spins in your hands.

In the past we have experimented with spinnaker poles, purpose built steering blades and towed buckets (with and without holes in the bottom). It's fair to say that results (on a very calm day) varied from the hopeless to the abysmal. The spinnaker pole/rudder blade combination proved impossible to control, both because of a strong tendency for the business end to float and an inability to grip the inboard pole end sufficiently firmly to control it when it did bite. The buckets (with added holes) were the best bet - but with them we could only either turn to port quickly, or very slowly. They were not sufficient to fully overcome prop walk on their own, so just reduced it or added to it.

So, what was the gear we finally tried - and did it work? Well the gear was a "Para-Drogue" made by the same Australian firm that makes "Para-Anchors". Where the Para-anchor is designed to be set from the bow to hold you head to wind in survival conditions, its drogue cousin is deployed from the stern on an 80m rode attached to a bridle. It's designed to slow you down when running before a gale - or provide an effective and controllable means of steering in the event of a lost (or jammed ) rudder.

Having found a quiet stretch of Southampton Water (and after hoisting our improvised towing day shape), we rigged the drogue. We had a rope bridle running around the stern of the boat with a bowline on the bight forming a loop in the middle. To this was attached 30m of 12mm dyneema (an asymmetric spinnaker sheet) and then 40m of 14mm nylon. The drogue was attached to the nylon. (The drogue manufacturer recommends 80m of 14mm nylon but Juno races so we need to save a bit of weight - life's a compromise.) The ends of the bridle were led through the aft mooring fairleads and attached to Juno's primary winches. With the rudder locked amidships we started the trial.

The effect was instantaneous. Easing one end of the bridle line immediately swung the drogue to one side or the other and Juno changed course correspondingly. It was very simple to rig, and easy to control. Although our test was carried out under power on a calm day one of our JOG friends last year sailed 15 miles under #4 jib into Cherbourg's outer harbour after losing their entire rudder on the last race of the season and using exactly the same piece of kit. You can read J Fever's report of those events here.

So although we're not exactly looking forward to the possibility of losing our rudder, we do feel that we might have a chance of making our way home (slowly) if the worst should happen. Do you?